How to Build a Living Fence

If you own and maintain a garden, consider enhancing your garden with garden living fencing. So, let’s get this beautiful element of garden architecture as functional and as beautiful as it can be. A personal touch makes it more attractive.

Using standard pruning techniques, you can train dwarf fruit trees to form a living wall that will enhance your yard’s privacy and provide beauty and fresh produce. In an espalier (pronounced es-PAL-yay), plants grow along a usually flat, symmetrical framework against a wall, trellis, or freestanding support. Frequent pruning and tying of new growth directs the plants into a decorative pattern such as intersecting diamonds, or horizontal arms or elbows.

What You’ll Need

(C) Gardening Know How

Plan your espalier to meet your needs. If you want fruit, select a dwarf apple, peach, or pear that is rock-solid hardy in your area. For a purely ornamental fence, choose a blooming tree or shrub such as flowering crabapple, magnolia, or doublefile viburnum.

Although creating an espalier isn’t particularly difficult, it does take time. Expect to wait three years for fruit, and plan to spend some time each year doing light pruning and training of branches.

Bamboo can be a good living fence, too. Learn how to grow it.

Supplies:

three or more plants (dwarf fruit trees, for example)

posthole digger (optional)

4×4 posts (treated for soil contact or rot resistant cedar or similar wood)